 Hello everyone. Can you hear me all right or do I need to talk louder? A little louder? Okay, I will try to talk louder and if I don't, if I'm not loud enough, give me the thumbs in the back there so I know what to do. We're going to back up just a little bit from the presentation Tom just gave on the current status of our open course library and talk about the culture of sharing that we've developed in our system of 34 community and technical colleges in the state of Washington. This is a little creation story that I'm going to tell you which I always like to do. Distance, distant past. We're going to go all over the land. Our 34 community and technical colleges created a single student management system which we actually still use today and are trying really hard to move off of. But it was a great idea 30 years ago and because we all have the same student management system some possibilities existed and the point that I'm going to try to illustrate here is that a culture of sharing increases opportunities for sharing even if after a certain amount of time those artifacts or those programs become outdated that culture of sharing will persist. So time passes like 30 years. Sorry. In 1997 our colleges formed a consortium to create and share completely online courses. And so we started with 20 courses that constitute an AA degree. We started with a process not unlike the one we're using with the open course library which is we hired faculty to develop the courses. They were built and taught by the faculty and they were freely available and when we opened them in 1998 we would give them to anyone. And I'm going to show you a chart that will show you what happened with that. Because we shared that student management system though we were also able to pool enrollments very easily in those courses. So one college adopts a course and puts five students in and another college puts in two students and another college puts in six students. And among the 34 colleges you get full sections. And this was a very effective way to build online course delivery because the content was free and there was a possibility of sharing and because we were building capacity not only in courses but also in trained faculty and in course development. So we really like this pooled enrollment system. It allows students to access all the courses and services at one institution. So the student enrolls at one institution they may be taking courses that are taught at another institution but to the student it appears a local course. Other grades are together all of that. It allows our colleges to offer a wider variety of courses and also to serve a small number of students. Maybe they only have a few students each quarter who meet a certain class. They could throw those students into the pool. And we also think those courses are flexible and efficient. We can scale them up or down. Well probably by the end of the presentation I'll figure out where to point this thing. And this is what happened. This starts in fall of 2003 and before that it was growing kind of the same. But the top line the blue line is total e-learning and you can see that there is a tremendous growth. And the green line is the non-shared courses. But the shared courses pretty straight right across the bottom. And actually right now they're dropping even further it's dramatically dropping right now. So is that a good thing or a bad thing? What we thought is we thought hey success. We thought we did what we set out to do which was to jump start this process. We created courses. We shared them out. Gave them to people free. We figured out a way to offer them. And look what happened to e-learning. Our goal was to create access for students. Done. And so it worked. But at the same time there are those courses. You know they're shareable, they're open, but they're not getting used anymore. So what do you do about that? We thought about it. Why is it that these courses are no longer being shared? Why does that number stay so low? And one thing that we're pretty sure of is that faculty don't want a whole course. They don't want to take the course and say oh alright there it is. Now I'm going to A, B, C, 1, 2, 3 teach this course. And that's what we were offering them. And in fact we know that usually when faculty took those courses and copied them. They just used them as a beginning point. They might not have even used the course itself, only looked at it as a model. They may have kept only a few pieces of it and changed it over time. So to us the logical outgrowth of that was the open course library, which Tom's going to talk about in a minute. And another factor here that builds into this is that in 2007 our system put together a strategic technology plan. And the strategy one was to create a single system-wide suite of online teaching and learning tools. So this is sharing once again, but sharing not only the courses but also technology. And so we have since then, jeez, there we go. We share these services and tools. We've got Angel as Tom mentioned, Taverty Collaborate. We've got the Northwestie Tutoring Consortium. If anybody wants to join by the way. It's a great opportunity for tutoring. It's a collaborative, very inexpensive way to provide e-tutoring to all your students. Open to anyone. Professional Development and the Open Course Library, which we're going to talk a little bit more about. So we get all of these things that grow out of that idea of once you share something and start working as a group, then the opportunities to share other things appear. And people are immediately can buy into the next thing because they know that it's worked in the past. The Open Course Library we see is the logical extension of those first open courses that we did in 1998 in that there's a whole course and somebody can take the whole course if they want. But what's more likely is that they'll see all the pieces of content and say, oh, I could use this and I could use that. I'll mix these things together and then create the course. And this will more closely match the way instructors build courses. And that's our theory and we'll see starting on Monday if we're correct or not. I'm now running Unreserved Battery Power. Tom? Because of that, I'm going to turn it over to Tom. And actually, this is where it leads in that we will cultivate the practice, the culture and practice of using and contributing to open resources as part of that technology plan that I mentioned before, sharing the technology but also developing open resources which, by definition, are shareable. All right, good luck, Tom. Speaking of open sharing, does anyone have a Mac? A Mac power cable that they're willing to share openly? Fantastic. It probably could have even reached anywhere. Yeah, that'd be great. Wow, that's awesome. Just barely in... You can ask for PC. Look at that. That's gorgeous. How are you going to hand it back to her? That's right. It's all new. So we're going to talk a little bit about... Did you mention the strategic technology plan? Yeah. So I think the other element that I want to highlight from the strategic technology plan is just that it had baked into it this goal of engaging in OVR. So from the strategic technology plan it says, we will cultivate the culture and practice of using and contributing to open educational resources. Which I think is significant in a policy document. And again, it's something that we use. We leveraged that when people were asking, why are we doing this open thing? This was, once you get the policy problem solved, then you lean on that to get your buy-in in other places. So anyway, for us, it was kind of a logical next step. We had the internet. We had digital content. What were we missing? Everyone had those two and it wasn't really... We still weren't lowering costs and increasing access. So the open license was the key. And so with all of the other pieces that were sort of fitting into this puzzle, we also had the open licensing policy that came along right around the same time. Which was just a couple of years ago. And basically that says that any optional grant money that comes through the state board actually requires that the material being created by that money is then openly licensed and shared back. So it's really a key piece to our strategy of efficiency and really working to increase access, increase quality and lower cost. So this is just, from the College Board report, just a data point that full-time students spend now well over $1,000, closer to $1,200 on textbooks every year. Now if you're in the two-year college in the state of Washington, your tuition is right around $35, $3600. And then you add $1,200. That's 25% more on top of your tuition that you have to come up with. I mean your total outlay increases by a quarter because of textbooks. And so, again, for us that wasn't acceptable and we started looking at ways to bring that down. And our good friends at the student perks, Nicola I don't think is in the room right now, but, by the way, Nicola went literally across country, 40 universities and just bless her for having gone through that six weeks of a road trip with these very fun sort of SpongeBob-like looking comments. And the textbook rebellion really drove home the point that this is not okay. The way that textbook costs keep skyrocketing is not okay. And so just I think that the first step in solving a problem is just realizing that you have a problem. And so this is a great awareness campaign that Nicole Allen and Flaproll Knowledge put together. Another point that's important here is that even in the state of Washington, which by the way, Nicole's last two stops were in the UW and Evergreen College just right near where I live. And she leveraged grassroots support from, you know, at every college. She had student advocates that were, you know, dressing up in the puppet outfit, getting out there, talking to their fellow students. And we have the same thing in Washington. We have Student Voice Academy. We have students who are mobilizing around issues. And interestingly, the top issue of three years running is cutting textbook costs. So is this a pain point for students? Absolutely. So, and then just an example, but, you know, in English Composition 1, we have in our two-year colleges in Washington, we have 50,000 plus enrollments. And if you're saving, or if you can save $100 per textbook, which is just, you know, that's a low number, actually, then that's $5 million saved to students every year. Well, why are we so adamant about saving students money? Well, because number one, if they can't buy the textbook, they're not going to do very well in the class. I mean, that's clear. Student perks has done research around that and it's, you know, and that shows. The other thing is that students are taking out student loans to be able to afford the cost of their education. So, and many of those loans are subsidized by state and federal government. So really, we should all care. It's not just saving students money. It's actually saving all of us money. And so just a little bit on some of the legislation that has led us to this point. And I think it's important to point out that this progression that Connie described is really just that. I mean, we started with this idea that we could do things more efficiently by sharing our enrollments and it progressed from there. And so using the legislative influences, because legislators get the idea that this is an important efficiency, especially in difficult economic times. But really anytime it makes sense to get the most out of your dollar. So one of the things in Hospital 1025, we added just a little piece right here. So this is the existing piece of legislation that says, look, you need to consider the least expensive option if, you know, all things being equal. And we went ahead and included open textbooks as one of the options there. And I think, again, each little step bringing you closer to convincing others that open education is okay. And they have permission to go there. And that's, I think, that's where all these little steps lead. So again, substitute Senate House Bill 1946, really that talks about open licensing options and then sites as examples, open coursework, open textbooks, open journals, and open learning objects. So another piece of legislation that went through. We talked about the open policy and so I won't touch on this right now. But really a critical piece to leading up to the open course library. And by the way, the open policy says everything that we produce is CC by. It's not just choose your open licenses. We want it as open as possible because, well, it creates opportunities. We talked about this in the last presentation a little bit. So for those of you who were here, sorry for the duplication. But I want to just now focus a little bit on the open course library goals. And really the open course library is about four things. It's about designing and sharing 81 high and rolling courses. So we're not just tinkering around the edges. We're going for the big courses. The courses with the most enrollments, pre-college and gatekeeper courses. It's about improving completion rates. Of course it's lowering textbook costs. And one of the things with the open course library is that no single course can use materials that are over $30. And actually most of our courses don't have any cost at all in the open course library. 26 out of the 42 have zero cost. So the interesting thing about that, I'll just pause and insert this. So the Saylor Foundation, so this is one of the serendipitous cool things that happens when you share. But the Saylor Foundation came along and we sort of met up at a conference and realized that we had very similar goals. They were focused on delivering open content directly to learners. We were focused on creating these resources to give to faculty. And so we both had different audiences but really very similar goals. The Saylor Foundation folks said, well gee, can we use your materials? And we said, absolutely. So we actually worked it out so that we were sharing with them even before the official launch. And they've already developed a few of our courses into, you know, into more modular, student-friendly, kind of self-learner-paced courses out on their website, Saylor.org. So it's just S-A-Y-L-O-R.org. And so anyway, it's just one of those things where in the process they actually came back to us and said, oh, you know, you got a couple broken links back on this one course. And we're like, oh, thanks. So that kind of collaboration is just really great because it helps us, it helps them, but really it helps the students. I mean, that's the bottom line. So lowering textbook costs, oh, and the whole reason I got on that little soapbox was because interestingly, and we're going to definitely push this in phase two in the next 39 courses that we build next year, it was the open, it was the 100% free courses that got picked up by the Saylor Foundation. So they were less interested in the $30 or less, you know, in the low-cost textbooks, but they really grabbed on to the 100% free. So we're going to really encourage our faculty in phase two to really think seriously about making their course have a zero cost. So anyway, the rest of this is really to get our faculty, the goal of the project, get our faculty engaged in the open course movement and really provide, we're providing our faculty with additional resources that they can leverage to improve their own courses. Everything's available at OpenCourseLibrary.org starting Monday and we'll have a big press release and we're pushing hard to make a splash out of this only because really our feeling is that the more people, students and faculty that hear about this, the greater the adoption rate will be. By the way, we also have a link on OpenCourseLibrary.org which is called our adoption form. So that's one of the ways that we're trying to track our adoptions is that similar to, you know, when any faculty adopts a textbook, they fill out an adoption form. Well, we're asking faculty who adopt our courses to fill out the adoption form to get a little bit of information about what was the cost of your last textbook, you know, are you spending anything on your new materials and then we can sort of measure our progress as we go. And so finally, at the end of it all, I think the main thing that matters here is efficient use of public funds to increase student success and access to quality education and quality materials. So really all of the business models are negotiable. We take all commerce publishers included and we will work with anyone that will work with us. And really this is our goal. So at the end of it all, we want to make education much more affordable in our state but then why not share it out with the world. And so we are selfish. We're building for our state. That's our focus. We're not building for the whole world. But you know what? Absolutely, we're willing to share that with everyone and other people will pick it up and hopefully customize it from there. So that's it. And hopefully we have just a minute or so for questions or a couple minutes. Yeah. Okay, so you've got your community colleges and your technical colleges on board. Why don't you have your four-year universities and your research institutions? Well, so define on board. Well, I mean, are they participating? Yes. Okay. Yeah. The grant to us. Okay, we're talking about our most 81 common courses but the four-year institutions are very interested. They've often wanted to share in our other courses but it was a closed system because we were on that same student analysis system. They weren't. So this is now open. Okay. The other thing is that they are working with us and we have to replace our learning management system and it's all 34 colleges and all six of our universities are working together. We'll see if we all agree on one but they are definitely interested. We're already sharing some of the technology as well. So yeah, they're interested. It's not, you know, it's the goal, the problem is figuring out how to make it easy. You know, is there a difference? Right. Absolutely. This is a brilliant idea. Congratulations on what you've achieved here. Just fantastic to see this. You feel, you've got a grant now to get things rolling and so forth. Do you feel comfortable long term? I mean, in 20 years from now that things will be in place that this will be owned by somebody financially to sustain it or do you think we have concerns there? That's a good quote. Yeah, we have concerns, absolutely. And actually we're designing the phase two very differently. We're doing everything in Google Docs and we're using a Google site to organize the course materials. The reason for that is number one, faculty were begging for more simplicity. I mean, they just, you know, many faculty, we were using a learning management system to create the content and many faculty just who were not familiar with that system, you know, it was spending 70% of our time learning technology instead of building content. But the reason we're moving to Google Docs, number one simplicity, number two, I'm going to put my money, if I had to bet between filling the blank name your learning management system and Google, Google would be there longer. You know, I'm going to put my money on Google and the truth is we just want to simplify right now. We're not looking, this is not a project about creating the next whiz bang, you know, thing that will run on your iPad. We want it to work on everything and we're not just talking about text. We have a YouTube account and we certainly can link out to all kinds of great resources as long as they're open. But the point is that we do have a sustainability problem and so our plan to be sustainable is designed from the beginning for zero money to have to be spent to continue and so really we're looking for the faculty to take ownership. We're jump starting it with this grant but if I can go into Google Docs and say save a copy and I have everything that I need, the chances are much greater that I'll adopt it instead of going and having to get my faculty technician to do some magic on the LMS to import the course. Our experience in the past is that the content that was used got maintained and the content that did get used. I left it out, we started with 20 courses, eventually there are now some 400 but some of them were get-on arrivals, some didn't last long and some are still living because faculty use them, they'll update them. I'm not beholden to the content, I'm beholden to the students. If the content is still useful to the students I want to keep it going. If the content is just content then I don't really care if it stays alive or not. I think the best content will persist and certainly we still want to find the best way to really have ownership of the faculty to continue to keep the content up to date. If they feel like it's their course in that Google Doc they're going to keep updating it. So thank you for attending.